AMD demos Trinity

AMD has demonstrated a working sample of its next-generation accelerated processing unit code-named Trinity.

Showing off the working chip at CES, the fabless chipmaker happened to let slip that the gizmo has a 17W thermal power design.

So far we have only seen Trinity working in notebooks, but at CES the company decided to demo an ultra low-voltage version of the chip and prove it can handle complex workloads.

It showed a laptop that played the Dirt 3 video game in DirectX 11 mode on one monitor and converted videos using Arcsoft MediaConverter on two other displays.

It was a pretty impossible task, and although according to Hot Hardware the game did not run really smoothly, it managed to do it with some speed.

Trinity will be made using 32nm SOI HKMG process technology at GlobalFoundries. The APU will feature up to four x86 cores powered by enhanced Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture, AMD Radeon HD 7000-series Southern Islands graphics core with DirectX 11-class graphics support, DDR3 memory controller and other improvements. The chips will be compatible with new FM2 infrastructure.

AMD is still tight-lipped about the configuration of 17W Trinity, so we don’t know clock-speeds, the number of x86 cores or the number of Radeon stream processors.

AMD is hoping that the new Trinity APUs will not only be faster than Llano, but more available because of improved yields as well as because there will be an increased number of 32nm SOI/HKMG wafers starting from the fourth quarters.